Mechanical characterization of digital collateral nerves: a cadaver study

Injuries to digital collateral nerves after hand trauma are frequent and results from surgical treatment are often poor (Schmidhammer et al. 2007). Characterization of mechanical behaviour of healthy collateral nerves is necessary to produce numeric models (Chang et al. 2015) and enhance the comprehension of nerve repair and regeneration process. There is no standard in the literature to characterize healthy nerve mechanics. The mechanical properties of the repaired nerve should be as similar as the healthy nerves, following the principles of mechanobiology (Aubry et al. 2015). The aim of this study was to characterize the mechanical properties of human digital collateral nerves to look for a correlation with density as an intrinsic property of materials